After Sarwar's 'Hail Mary', will he score better in the election?

Anas Sarwar threw a grenade into the Scottish Parliament election campaign with his call for Sir Keir Starmer to quit.

Scottish Labour's position in the polls was increasingly entrenched a long way short of putting him in contention to become first minister.

Three months shy of polling day, and the morning after the Superbowl, it was already time for what American football fans call the Hail Mary pass from Sarwar.

Go big or go home time.

So what are politicians at Holyrood making of it, less than three months out from polling day? And how might other parties respond to this move to shake up the state of play?

As soon as Sarwar stood up at his hastily arranged press conference on Monday, social media posts started popping up from Starmer's cabinet backing the prime minister's position.

It was a co-ordinated show of support - and by contrast the backing for the Scottish Labour leader came in a relatively muted trickle.

A handful of his Scottish Parliament colleagues were at the event; others tweeted during the evening; others eventually voiced support when chased through Holyrood's garden lobby by journalists.

It is now clear that this was not a carefully planned manoeuvre, months in the planning.

It did not flush out any potential leadership challengers at Westminster and the Welsh Labour leader eventually joined the ministers and MPs throwing their lot in with the prime minister.

So it is no surprise that MSPs turned up at Holyrood looking slightly shell-shocked on Tuesday.

Sarwar was not among them - apparently working in the community rather than parliament or facing the media - and after a day of drama his colleagues mostly seemed keen to keep their heads down.

During topical questions there were three Labour MSPs in the chamber, although that did double to six later in the afternoon while the parliament was amending some legislation.

In fairness this is not hugely unusual at the moment; Holyrood's garden lobby has felt very quiet of late, with members of all parties taking advantage of the ability to contribute and vote remotely by spending more time out in the constituencies.

Labour's Neil Bibby even posted a picture of himself campaigning in Paisley.

And those door-knocking sessions are in large part what has led us here - Labour canvassers had been getting a hard time from voters, increasingly so amid revelations about Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein.

Sarwar's calculation seems to have been that it will be easier not to have to defend the actions of what polls consistently suggest is a deeply unpopular UK government.

For all the awkward questions this move presents, at least he and his party won't have to pretend that everything is fine - and this removes one hurdle to redirecting the anger of a disaffected electorate towards the Scottish government instead of the UK one.

This has been a long-running sore, as some Labour MSPs wasted no time on Tuesday in reeling off a series of complaints with the UK administration, ranging from winter fuel payments and welfare reforms to the treatment of Waspi women.

A pattern had been cementing itself in the polls that Labour was locked in a struggle with Reform UK for second place, rather than with the SNP for first.

Sarwar posted a campaign video on his social media channels on Tuesday afternoon reiterating that he is putting country before party.

He is almost borrowing the old SNP slogan about being "stronger for Scotland" and held his press conference in front of a large Saltire banner reminiscent of one Nicola Sturgeon used in the 2021 campaign.

We are told that this kind of digital messaging is going to form a big part of Labour's campaign.

But it is worth noting that the UK party has been bankrolling it thus far.

Google's Ad Transparency library suggests that at least £65,000 was spent on dozens of Scottish-specific ads over the last couple of months, with Sarwar prominent in many of them.

Meanwhile the Scottish Labour account has only run one ad over that same period, costing a maximum of £200.

It's perhaps hard to see that kind of support from the UK party HQ continuing - although Sarwar may have calculated that with Sir Keir's future potentially hanging on the outcome of May's elections either way, the prime minister cannot afford to cut off funding.

The prime minister reiterated on Tuesday afternoon that he is "100%" backing Sarwar to be an "incredible" first minister - even if the feeling isn't mutual.

Elsewhere at Holyrood, other parties are breaking out the popcorn.

There is of course an unnerving element of unpredictability to all of this; Sarwar has done this with the express intention of shaking things up.

The SNP, for example, would probably be quite happy to keep an unpopular prime minister in post - they are already trying to set themselves up as the anti-Starmer vote.

But the party increasingly sees this as a win-win situation. Given the lack of a clear successor, any prime ministerial vacancy would likely spark a messy leadership contest.

John Swinney has previously tried to elevate himself above the issue to an extent, happy to criticise Sir Keir without expressly calling for him to go.

He has been happy to remain first ministerial while leaving the attack dog role to Westminster leader Stephen Flynn.

However, that may begin to pivot now, because despite the first minister's innate caution, senior figures in the SNP are increasingly confident that there is no upside for Sarwar.

In fact, they think things look so dire for Labour that some are starting to murmur about whether they might genuinely end up in the sort of "two horse race" with Reform UK that they had previously hyped up.

Nigel Farage's party recently won a council by-election in West Lothian in an area where the Labour vote collapsed and have polled strongly in former Labour heartlands in Fife and around Glasgow.

The Scottish Conservatives, meanwhile, are even further adrift in the polls than Labour and are similarly desperate for something to happen to shift things around.

Even the Greens are keen to have some fun, with the party tabling a Holyrood motion calling for the prime minister's resignation and daring Labour members to sign it.

Scottish Labour's hope is that breaking from Starmer means they can focus on devolved issues, without what Sarwar termed the "distraction" of who happens to be running the UK government.

On Wednesday, the party is meant to be leading two debates in the Holyrood chamber - on the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and on community policing.

But if Sarwar turns up for those debates, will people be talking about the issues, or the Westminster soap opera he's been playing a part in?

Ultimately, he will be hoping that he has made this move early enough that the chatter will start to fade by the time of the campaign proper, and that he won't have to spend all his time defending the UK government.

Or if there are further twists to come - say following the Gorton and Denton by-election - that he is now out in front of the pack.

Events can always derail any strategy of course, and within 24 hours Sarwar found himself back in lockstep the UK leadership.

After months of questions Labour withdrew the whip from MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy over her continued friendship with convicted sex offender Sean Morton - at the same time as the party did the same for Matthew Doyle in the House of Lords, over his links to the same man.

For all the efforts to shake off the "branch office" label, the Scottish and UK operations use the same independent complaints process, which is now investigating both Doyle and Duncan-Glancy - leading to their suspensions.

While the focus of the May election is on Holyrood, events at Westminster matter.

Voters still have views about immigration and foreign affairs, and indeed big issues like independence are tied up in intergovernmental intrigue.

And they will inevitably have a view on who the prime minister should be.

Sarwar's aim was to bring himself more into line with what a large chunk of the electorate has been telling pollsters and canvassing politicians for some time.

It remains to be seen whether his big gamble pays off when people cast their votes for real.